You know that moment when something difficult suddenly makes sense?

That's what I do best.

Whether teaching composition, literature, or technology, I'm an instructor who focuses on the quality of the experience as much as the learning outcomes. I purposefully design insightful moments of understanding that extend beyond the course to promote academic and professional workplace competencies.

Teaching Philosophy

There is an electric moment of discovery, when, in an instant, a student's awareness ignites. This experience cultivates a lingering interest in the subject that extends beyond the course. As an instructor, I structure my lectures to facilitate such moments, and I then craft my assignments to guide the students towards recognizing the material work of concepts across cultural production and the associated artifacts in their lives. For example, I have walked my students, and other classes, around campus to sites of racial hate crimes and bias, where we have discussed not only what happened and what it revealed but also read from Peggy McIntosh's “White Privilege” at each site, after which I have asked the students to write reflection pieces.

My lectures are conversational and active, and they always revolve around real objects. This not only allows the class to move beyond surface details but also opens up space for students with various learning styles to engage with the content. For example, when teaching analysis, I would start by discussing a previously assigned reading by Wittgenstein to uncover particular areas to revisit in the lecture; then, doubling as an in-class activity and practical application of the reading, I would ask the students to explore popular songs for illogical, incoherent lyrics; finally, as an in-class writing exercise, I would ask the students to use logic to respond to an open-ended prompt, after which the class could compare the anonymous compositions to evaluate which techniques were effective and why. This approach enables the students not only to absorb the theory but also to learn practical techniques and gain practical experience using them, thereby enhancing the intensity of the student learning outcomes.

When possible, my introductory composition courses explore how classic models of rhetorical situations are troubled by science fiction's estranging elements. My students learn how we might better understand ideal modes of persuasion and rhetorical ecologies through the very examination of extraordinary events from science fiction that deny them purchase. To these ends, for example, I have assigned “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (Le Guin), Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), The City and the Stars (Clarke), Dune (Herbert), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke), and Solaris (Lem). Through torture, substance use, cognitive suppression and telepathy, precognition, neuromanipulation, and personhood, respectively, these texts deploy para-rhetorical operations and technologies that disrupt our practical conceptualizations of rhetorical modes of persuasion and rhetorical situations. In other words, my students learn how to break structural models to better see how they work. This process imparts by design a sophisticated, probing perspective to their projects, for they learn how to verify and falsify their claims within theoretical frameworks.

From in-class activities to flipped classrooms, on topics from popular culture to narratological genres, I structure my lectures to incorporate a wide range of experiences and examples in order to demonstrate to the students the importance of convincingly arguing and evidencing their claims. Moreover, I often take traditional methods and approach them obliquely to allow the students to connect more deeply with concepts than notes or texts alone allow. For example, when teaching argumentation, I would assign a philosophy article that uses multiple situational and conceptual metaphors to show how analogies bolster claims. My lessons are inspired by the Robert Hutchins quote that an “education is not to reform students... or to make them expert technicians” but to “unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, [and] teach them to think straight.” Collectively, these goals serve as the academic paradigm on which my teaching philosophy is based. Since this paradigm easily lends itself to the modern English curriculum without changing the expected core outcomes, I am able to foster a transformative learning environment, which I measure through process-based assignments and debriefing conversations.

While my focus as a teacher has always centered on student growth, the craft of teaching has required me to grow as well. When I began teaching, I primarily relied on lectures and discussion, but I came to understand how crucial engagement is to the production and transference of knowledge. Now, I create pre- and post-lecture materials, often leveraging popular culture, to prime and reinforce learning objectives, thereby dramatically improving the quality of in-class discussions and project deliverables. Further, I continue to refine my approach and techniques on the basis of student feedback and professional observations.

Whether teaching composition or literature, I ensure that my courses introduce crucial analytic, multimodal, and collaborative opportunities that not only fit within a broader liberal arts curriculum but also translate well into professional workplace competencies. Thus, my approach to course development interweaves effective writing with academic achievement, intellectual curiosity, and cooperative problem-solving. Above all, my courses bolster critical and lateral thinking—skills that can only be developed through discovery.

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